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[NW_Kohaku]

If the wiki's statement that a day =1200 ticks is accurate, then an animal can be milked every 16 2/3 days.

I think it runs off of the cow's turns not direct time.  Hence, it's more like ten times that. (167 days, roughly half a year.)

Of course, maybe this was considered buggy behavior, and Toady corrected it at some point when I wasn't paying much attention.

[astianax]

there's also a potentially huge difference in the amount of grazing needed per animal. rabbits have the quickest hunger satisfaction (at grazer:120000) and, from what i've seen so far, draltha will basically strip your whole area and still nearly starve (grazer:24). so, i'm sure people are gonna be modifying things, maybe setting all their grazers to eat like bunnies...

[spook54321]

How fast does grass grow back?
How much grass gets consumed per 'bite'?

would it be possible to let one cow/horse/other animal sit in one pasture and not exhaust its food source due to over-grazing, or does the animals feeding overtake the growth rate so that this is impossible, thus meaning that all forts would eventually run out of grass.

[NW_Kohaku]

How fast does grass grow back?
How much grass gets consumed per 'bite'?

would it be possible to let one cow/horse/other animal sit in one pasture and not exhaust its food source due to over-grazing, or does the animals feeding overtake the growth rate so that this is impossible, thus meaning that all forts would eventually run out of grass.

I'm not sure, there's apparently a bug with grass: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77656.0

Basically, only one grass is supposed to grow per tile (grasses compete for space until one manages to crowd out the others and actually become a "grass tile" at a certain size), but apparently, multiple grasses can grow at the same time.

If/when this gets fixed, grazers may mow through grass at a much faster rate.

[Zwaryczuk]

So just a couple of questions about grass growing...

1) When I build underground grass pastures I see the grass grows as "thin" or "sparse"  where the grass on the surface is dense of the same type. Does thin grass provide less sustenance than thick grass? Or its just different types of grass?

2) Does surface grass grow faster than inside grass? (I'm not talking about cavern grass)

3) Does biome effect the speed of grass growth? If so I'm assuming a warm, with high rainfall?

4) If I have wet stone and breach the caverns will I start to grow cave grass on my wet stone floors?

Thanks

[Girlinhat]

Sparse grass and thick grass are the same grass, expect one has been growing for longer.

All grass seems to grow the same in a given biome.

Yes, deserts and tundra show low grass growth, while forests show high.  Exact formula isn't known yet.

Cave trees and shrubs will grow on, or near, underground mud.  Currently, regular grass grows underground, instead of cave moss, but grass grows on any soil without much effort.

[Jurph]

I will be happy to contribute some (probably redundant) advice.  Elephants cannot be tamed, because once they become tame, they begin operating under the laws of [GRAZER] and trying to eat fast enough to avoid hunger.  They are physically incapable of doing so, and will starve to death within a season unless you provide them with hay, which does not yet exist.

I suggest, if we are truly attempting !!SCIENCE!!, that we try a few pasture sizes for each species.  Assuming we have fast grass growth, can a sheep survive indefinitely in a 6x6 pasture?  5x5? 4x4?  A sufficiently motivated scientist could embark with six or eight sheep and try pastures of nearly every size.  If you start with six sheep in pastures of 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, 3x4, 4x4, and 4x5 squares, and prepare pastures of 5x5, 5x6, etc., you can keep rotating the smallest-pastured sheep up to the next empty size.  When you have no hungry sheep after a year, you know you've found something sustainable.  Sheep and goats have the same GRAZER duration so you can mix and match to get better food variety.

As for the amount of food that dwarves consume, we know that a dwarf eats 2 units of food and 4 of drink per season.  All milkable animals produce "20,000" (one unit?) of milk, so with six sheep on embark being milked twice a month, we get 36 milk per season -- enough to sustain 18 dwarves or (no surprise) three dwarves per sheep.  A single tile of rock nuts, tended by a Proficient Grower and harvested to a sheep's-wool-bag, yields 20 or so quarry bush leaves in two of the four seasons, which can be used with sheep cheese to create Dwarven Quesadillas, stretching the food supply quite a bit.

If a sheep can sustain three dwarves with little or no help, then it follows that a dwarf is effectively a [GRAZER:3600], requiring one-third the grass that a single sheep requires.  Now off to see if I can run a Sheep Fortress.

Oh!  One last thing.  If we embark with six animals of two species (sheep and goat) and take one male and two females of each, we can expect two lambs each spring, which can be slaughtered for their meat without ever using a tile of grass or rotated into the breeding stock in place of a slaughtered parent, for a larger meat return but a temporary reduction in breeding and milk production.  Once you have a breeding & butchering operation, the number of dwarves you can support in the out years -- still on the same pasture allocation you established at embarkation! -- rises dramatically.

If you're not a total pUrist about it, you can use that single tile of farmland to grow booze crops in the non-quarry-bush season.  If you insist on being a nitpicker, you can trade high-value cheese roasts for booze and raw food at each caravan, greatly amplifying your sustainability.

[Girlinhat]

The idea, for pure scientific reasoning, is to have dwarves drink water (gasp!) and eat only what the animals provide.  Namely, milk and butcher products.  You can find the grazing area of a single sheep by assigning that sheep to a grazing area, and waiting a few years, then building a wall within that area, reducing the available grass by 1 tile.  Repeat until sheep dies of starvation.  That's the required area.  If you're going off milk and cheese, then it's all a very consistent rate of food intake, but if you're going for butchering you'll need a much larger stock for breeding, larger grazing land, but ultimately larger food stocks, plus extra milk and tallow that can be cooked.

Ideally, a purely scientific exploration of this would have a few hax reactions for adamantine, which would be used for tables and chairs, to make sure your dwarves were super-ecstatic over their living arrangements and didn't mind drinking water, and then the pasture-food could be tested.

[TheyTarget]

The idea, for pure scientific reasoning, is to have dwarves drink water (gasp!) and eat only what the animals provide.  Namely, milk and butcher products.  You can find the grazing area of a single sheep by assigning that sheep to a grazing area, and waiting a few years, then building a wall within that area, reducing the available grass by 1 tile.  Repeat until sheep dies of starvation.  That's the required area.  If you're going off milk and cheese, then it's all a very consistent rate of food intake, but if you're going for butchering you'll need a much larger stock for breeding, larger grazing land, but ultimately larger food stocks, plus extra milk and tallow that can be cooked.

Ideally, a purely scientific exploration of this would have a few hax reactions for adamantine, which would be used for tables and chairs, to make sure your dwarves were super-ecstatic over their living arrangements and didn't mind drinking water, and then the pasture-food could be tested.

If you're hacking in adman for happiness you could just give them the [NO_DRINK] tag (? I think thats it), then just see how much they need to eat and ignore water and booze altogether.

edit- Better yet just remove  [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT] from the dwarfs. Problem solved.

[Flaede]

The idea, for pure scientific reasoning, is to have dwarves drink water (gasp!) and eat only what the animals provide.  Namely, milk and butcher products.  You can find the grazing area of a single sheep by assigning that sheep to a grazing area, and waiting a few years, then building a wall within that area, reducing the available grass by 1 tile.  Repeat until sheep dies of starvation.  That's the required area.  If you're going off milk and cheese, then it's all a very consistent rate of food intake, but if you're going for butchering you'll need a much larger stock for breeding, larger grazing land, but ultimately larger food stocks, plus extra milk and tallow that can be cooked.

Ideally, a purely scientific exploration of this would have a few hax reactions for adamantine, which would be used for tables and chairs, to make sure your dwarves were super-ecstatic over their living arrangements and didn't mind drinking water, and then the pasture-food could be tested.

If you're hacking in adman for happiness you could just give them the [NO_DRINK] tag (? I think that's it), then just see how much they need to eat and ignore water and booze altogether.

edit- Better yet just remove  [ALCOHOL_DEPENDENT] from the dwarfs. Problem solved.

simplest is to add [ALCOHOL_CREATURE] to the milk material. or to the milk extract in the sheep raw.
personally, if we're modding, I'd rather include a reaction to brew "Kefir" from milk.

EDIT: How fast does grass re-grow? Does anyone have hard numbers?

[MarcAFK]

erm, if a goat really needs 6 tiles than you need ; approx 300 grass for 50 goats, 1800 grass for cows, and 3600 grass for 50 water buffalo

[yacheritsi]

Too bad you can't milk dralthas.

[NW_Kohaku]

Has anyone tested how different grass grows based upon rainfall yet?  If grasses all grow at the same rate, regardless of locale, you could make a static "goats require 6 tiles" declaratoin, but if not, you would need a different number of tiles based upon how rainy the region is.

[Jurph]

I've started my Caprin Fortress.  I am embarking with six [GRAZER:1200] creatures (6 sheep, 6 goats) and will likely have [GRAZER:RAVENOUS] creatures pulling my wagon, so I should be able to correlate grazer numbers to grass tiles for my (very rainy) location.  I will report back with !!SCIENCE!!, but I would urge the rest of you to also attempt to quantify GRAZER data in a slightly more arid biome.

Definitely carving my Great Hall in the shape of a sheep skull.

Update: I have determined that a [GRAZER:1200] can deplete just about one tile of dense grass per month, even in a rainy biome.  The smaller the pasture, the more aggressively they go after grass and denude the soil.  The tug-of-war bug means that whenever I queue up a bunch of milking and shearing jobs, I have to let the animals all out of their pastures briefly, and I can't be certain I've assigned them back to their different-sized pastures correctly, but as of 22 Hematite, the pastures stand as follows:

• 2x2 pasture - three of four tiles depleted, last tile "sparse"
• 2x3 pasture - 1 dense, 2 normal, 3 sparse tiles, and none depleted
• 3x3 pasture - 6 dense, 0 normal, 3 sparse, and 0 depleted

If we assume that a tile's grass depth is two bits (00 = soil, 01 = sparse, 10 = normal, 11 = dense) or 0-3 units of grass, it looks like the first goat started with 12 units of grass and depleted 11 of them in almost 4 months.  The second goat started with 18 units of grass, and has probably also depleted 11... but because normal and dense tiles are nearby, some of them grew back.  The total depletion in that pasture has only been 8 units of grass.  Having the extra two tiles of grass (or perhaps having an extra two tiles of perimeter) seems to have resulted in an extra 3 units of grass growth.  Having another three tiles of pasture gave us 27 starting units and only a net loss of 6 grass consumed, or an extra 2 units of grass growth.

If we assume that all three pastures were grazed at the same rate -- let's guess that they actually lost 12 units of grass each, and growback was 1 unit, 4 units, and 6 units respectively -- then there is probably a size at which we could grow back 12 units of grass.  That's the sustainable pasture size we're shooting for.  Remember that these numbers are only valid for GRAZER:1200...

Over three months, we saw:
2x2, area 4 tiles, perimeter of 12 => 1 unit of growback
2x3, area 6 tiles, perimeter of 14 => 4 units of growback
3x3, area 9 tiles, perimeter of 16 => 6 units of growback

I feel like each grass tile's growth rate is based on the density of adjacent grass (did I read that somewhere?) so there may be an advantage to long, skinny pastures where each grazed tile will always have two dense neighbors.

[Zwaryczuk]

Using 31.25

Has anyone conducted any Science in relation to grass growing in the new version. We are unable to have indoor secure pastures without having a pit in the ground. Can we make a glass roof and still have grass grow?

What if we explore the use of cave moss or fungus, will animals eat it? How can we build safe protected zones deep in the ground carved into the earth. What i'm trying to figure out is what are the exact conditions to grow cave moss? Will muddied stone work? Does is need to be within the level of the caves?

I personally don't like to build in the caves because it makes things quite uneven.

Any thoughts?